Asphalt Paving Services in Fort Lee, NJ

Fort Lee, NJ Case Study

Steep Palisades Driveway Rebuilt to Actually Handle the Grade

The Problem
A homeowner on the Palisades hillside in Fort Lee had watched their driveway fail twice in eight years — same spots, same problems. Cracking along both edges, corrugation near the bottom where they hit the brakes, water pooling at the side instead of running off. They’d had two other contractors repave it and neither one lasted. They called R&D Paving and asked us to tell them why.

What We Did
The answer was the same both times: nobody engineered it for a steep grade. We came out, walked the driveway, and identified three things the prior contractors missed — the cross-drainage wasn’t directing water away from the edges, the bottom transition geometry was creating a brake-stress concentration zone, and the mix spec used was standard suburban asphalt that deforms under continuous hillside brake loads. We rebuilt the drainage swales at the edges, reshaped the bottom transition, and specified a polymer-modified asphalt mix with higher stiffness for the slope conditions.

The Outcome
First winter through — no corrugation, no edge cracking, no pooling. The homeowner said it was the first driveway that actually drove right from day one. They also said they wished they’d called us first instead of being the third company to fix the same problem.

What the Client Said

“I’d had this done twice before and it kept failing in the same spots. R&D was the first contractor who actually looked at why and fixed the real problems — the drainage, the bottom curve, the asphalt mix. It’s held up perfectly. Hire them first.”
— Homeowner, Fort Lee, NJ